The Future of Energy

BoingBoing just posted a link to a Popular Science special section: The Future of Energy, 10 Steps To End America’s Fossil-Fuel Addiction. I notice that the photo illustrating step #2 shows a guy with a bicycle, but it’s not what I thought at first glance. It’s not about using bikes more and cars less. It’s about a guy who makes bicycles and powers his plant with solar panels. Step #3 endorses more hybrid cars, which isn’t too surprising, considering that the whole section is sponsored by Toyota. What’s wrong with this picture?

It isn’t until step #10 that they suggest using less energy. Everything else is about being more efficient, producing power closer to where it’s consumed, using smarter technologies to extract power from alternate sources so we can continue consuming at our current level. And, you know, I’m all for alternate energy. Great, wonderful. But all the alternate energy in the world isn’t enough to offset our stupid habits: shipping everything we eat from thousands of miles away, driving a mile to drop a video off at BlockBuster, buying nearly all of our consumer goods from Asia, etc. It’s like Keith says in the comments of A Convenient Lie: we’re driving towards a cliff at 90mph, and articles like this encourage us to think that slowing to 50mph is the solution.

11 thoughts on “The Future of Energy”

“Could double America’s mileage,” they trumpet? Is that meant to be impressive? When you look at the behemoths on the roads right now, a whole lot of that first 100% improvement starts to look like low-hanging fruit.

Imagine that we did double US mileage overnight. I wonder where that’d put us in terms of gallons per person per year of gasoline for personal transportation, compared to other first-world nations.

A quicke and dirty analysis using CIA World Factbook data: oil consumption by nation is here. Population is here. Of course, total oil consumption is only a very rough substitute for personal trasport gasoline consumption, but it gives a least some idea.

Congo uses the least oil per person, at 0.00013 bbl/person/day. The Virgin Islands, unexpectedly, use the most, at 0.97. The Virgin Islands is a far outlier along with Gibraltar, so perhaps this is an anomaly related to the accouning of fuel used for marine shipping, or something.

Using a fairly inclusive notion of what a developed nation is, I find that the US ranks third out of 50 in oil consumption per person, at .067 bbl/person/day, behind Luxembourg and Canada. If we halved our consumption, that would put us at 25th, right between France at .034 and Germany at .032.

Where I work, so many people are commuting from places such as Federal Way, Kent, or even Lacey. So with an Xtracyle with a Stokemonkey, you could make the one-way commute from Federal Way in about an hour or you could spend two hours one-way commuting from Lacey.

Now, people should live closer to where they work but sometimes the home you can afford and the job you find aren’t close. So that leaves people with the question of how to get to work in a reasonable amount of time.

Not that I’m disagreeing with your underlying premise (using bikes as much as possible and cars as little as possible = good), but if you’re headed at a cliff at 90 mph, then slowing to 50 gives you more time to turn around. If the first step to solution reads “Change everything about the world all at once” then that’s pretty much a non-starter.

In a heavy industrial state like the US, we use a lot of petroleum in our foods, in fertilizers, packaging, and the energy to manufacture and distribute them. Those tidy little bags of salad greens from the Central Valley of California? They are kept in a 36 degree environment from the time they are picked to when you take them home. Call it 4-5 days and 1000+ miles. The fossil-fuel addiction is much more pervasive than cars.

CarlosT brings up a good point: when you still have people denying climate change and/or the role of humans in creating it, drastic solutions are right out.

Right you are; commuting without a car isn’t a particularly sane idea for someone who lives in Lacey and works in Seattle. There was a time when it would have been–we had the Interurban light rail system. But post-WWII, urban development became centered around the car, and it’s been that way ever since. (Remember the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where the oil and auto industries buy up streetcar companies and then shut them down, so there’s no alternative to driving? Yeah, that actually happened.) So, let’s say it’s taken us 70 years of concerted effort to get where we are now. How long do you think it’ll take to reverse that? If we don’t tell people that we _need_ to reverse it?

Slowing from 90mph to 50mph is a great start, but not if it’s sold as the final solution to the problem. Once everyone’s switched to solar/wind/tidal/geothermal energy and replaced all their incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent, if they’re still headed for the cliff, why should they believe any solution that gets proposed next? After all, they’ve made all these sacrifices that they were told would solve the problem, and the problem still exists. Why should they trust anyone on the subject again?

I’m all for implementing the suggestions in the PopSci article, but I think that the point they’ve hidden in #10 should be front and center as point #1. We need to _reduce our consumption_, but until we can do that, here are ways we can mitigate the impact of our current levels.

And I’m aware this isn’t just about commuting. My incomplete list of stupid habits that are screwing us included an entry for not eating locally. This is why we’re growing a vegetable garden and buying as much food as we can from the farmers market. And given the choice at Whole Foods between locally-grown conventional produce and organic produce from California or Chile, I find I’m choosing the local stuff more and more often.

I agree that telling people that selling to people that slowing down is the solution is irresponsible. The one thing I didn’t like about the film was when Gore was laying out how to get carbon emissions down, he lists carbon capture and sequestration saying “you’ll hear a lot more about that later.” Except that we don’t, not in the film anyway.

As for the article, I can agree that the emphasis is all wrong, but efficiency is one of the ways to get to reduction in consumption. If we can do everything we do now using less energy, obviously that’s a reduction.

Also, I’d like to point out that the items on your list of stupid habits are bad insofar as the energy involved is a net contributor of carbon. Driving a mile to the Blockbuster in a completely emission free vehicle is no more environmentally damaging than walking or biking there. Obviously, one is giving up the health benefits of those forms of transportation, but in terms of global warming they’re equivalent.

Finally back to commuting. I spent a few days in San Francisco recently, and it’s amazing what a fully multi-modal transit system can do. There really isn’t anywhere in San Francisco you can’t get to by transit, and apparently there aren’t a lot of places the region either that you can’t get there by transit. In our case, I’ve always believed that the Olympia – Everett corridor would be an ideal place for high speed rail. It’s 90 miles between those two cities and high speed rail can easily reach speeds between 150 to 180 mph (experimental designs can reach as high as 360 mph). This means the whole trip would take between 30 to 40 minutes. Combining that with light rail and other forms of local transit within the cities would make transit commuting much more attractive. Suddenly that Lacey commute which is an hour plus now is 20 minutes on high speed rail plus a few minutes on light rail. Plus the consequences for falling asleep are much less dire when you’re sitting on a train rather than behind the wheel.

Driving a mile to the Blockbuster in a completely emission free vehicle is no more environmentally damaging than walking or biking there.

Emission-free or emission-elsewhere? Where/how do the stored electrons get made?

And reading up on the history and reach of the Interurban is informative. Everett to Tukwila without needing a car? Sign me up. And it was still running in the 40s. The short-term thinking that brought us a car in every garage has a lot to answer for.

That point is hidden pretty well in #10. First they have to assure us that it’s not like the bad, unhip old days when we were all turning off lights. To be green, we need not change any habits; we just have to accessorize our lifestyle with better technology.

I’m all for better technology, but I’m also for turning the lights off when one leaves a room for more than a few minutes. Because I am super uncool.

Matt: Since I live in Seattle, I know most if not all my power comes from clean hydro, but not everyone is so fortunate. What works for us here may not work for someone without the natural blessings of water in high places.

I moved here from a place where coal and nuclear power were the main sources: the coal, coupled with the auto emissions, made for air you could see.